Free Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) by Ken Auletta Page B

convicted of fraud and almost disbarred. Weitzman assured Biondi that Kassan was of good character. And Biondi says that for the first year Kassan did a good job. “But the firm needed to raise more money, and Michael volunteered to lead the raise. The Internet bubble had begun to burst.” The money dried up. “In the end, Michael was totally unsuccessful in raising funds. In fairness to him, I’m not sure God could have raised money at that point.”
    “He was home a lot,” Ronnie Kassan says, and people would call seeking his advice. “Michael, why don’t you charge them?” she asked him.
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    He listened to her. Over the next three years he performed a variety of consulting jobs for companies in the U.S. and Europe, mostly smaller companies asking him to help them strategize and to connect them to other companies.
    Kassan saw a void he could fill. The advertising and marketing world was in turmoil, soon to be disrupted by the Internet and digital upstarts like Google and Yahoo. Clients who paid for and media platforms that sold advertising sought guidance, but couldn’t turn to agencies for neutral advice. Sellers wanted to be introduced to buyers, digital companies to brands. His experience with brands and media companies at Western and with digital companies at Massive Media—plus the insecurities of an industry seeking a life raft, plus his charm and connections and the three years he spent as a consultant—convinced Kassan he could build a unique service company. He and MediaLink would serve as both a connector and a hand-holder.
    He set out to recruit a financial partner to help him quickly scale the business, and thought the Hollywood talent agencies would be a natural fit. “I walked up Wilshire where the talent agencies were located with my hat in my hand,” he recalls. “I didn’t need a job. My consulting business was doing well. But I wanted to do it with a team. The agencies gave me a lot of ‘Ya, ya. No, no.’”
    Undaunted, he launched MediaLink himself in 2003, expanding over time to perform an array of related functions. MediaLink’s purpose, Kassan said, “was to provide adult supervision in the midst of chaos.” His friend Irwin Gotlieb sees a perfect match between a warm, capable personality and a frightened industry. “He knows everybody. My special talent is, you show me a number and I’ll remember it forever. Introduce me to three people, and I will have forgotten theirnames in five seconds. Michael will remember their names forever. He would be a natural politician.”
    This time, Kassan monitored his appetite, growing MediaLink slowly. The fifth employee, Karl Spangenberg, was not hired until 2007. An experienced ad sales executive with a wide range of media and digital companies, Spangenberg says that when he was a senior marketing executive at AT&T he “hired Kassan and MediaLink to open doors for me.”
    A New York office with a creaky freight elevator and little furniture was opened in 2008. Kassan gained a measure of fame when he was hired by Microsoft in 2008 to galvanize the digital community in opposition to Google making a search deal with Yahoo, and succeeded.
    “When Wenda joined in 2009, the business exploded,” Spangenberg says. Wenda Millard’s résumé displays the laurels of thirty-five years of traditional publishing and digital media jobs, including publisher of Family Circle and group publisher of Adweek , Mediaweek , and Brandweek magazines; chief sales officer for six years at Yahoo when that company was an Internet darling; and chief Internet officer at Ziff Davis Media and executive vice president of DoubleClick. She had also chaired the Interactive Advertising Bureau and was former president of the Advertising Club of New York. Millard and Kassan had known each other for years. When he approached her she was president and co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a company whose mercurial owner could be unsettling. Like